If you're curious about where your surname sprung from or what's the world's most common last name, a website that collates genealogical data can help you find out. Forbears.io can show how common your surname is, how many people bear the same title and whether it originated from an occupation, a male ancestor or a topographical feature.The most common surname in the US, Britain and Australia is Smith, according to the website.

A system known as DE-STAR - or Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation - will use laser beams to intercept and deflect space rocks. The concept has been around for several years, but a new paper is now presenting it as a viable solution to ward off dangerous 'Near Earth Objects' (NEOs). The system is the brainchild of UC Santa Barbara physicist Philip Lubin and Gary Hughes, a researcher and professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The inset concept diagram shows an orbiting DE-STAR engaged in multiple tasks including asteroid diversion, composition analysis, and long-range spacecraft power and propulsion.

A UFO watcher claims to have filmed an alien spacecraft (circled) hiding itself in storm clouds using highly advanced 'camouflage technology'. Footage of the incident, filmed from inside a parked car which the witness later uploaded to YouTube, shows a cylindrical object nestled among grey storm clouds in San Antonio, Texas. However, many of those who watched the video were quick to establish it looked more like a drop of water on the vehicle's windscreen than a UFO.

A new augmented reality headset aims to turn the world into your personal desktop. The $949 Meta 2 headset is an immersive experience, allowing for a wide field of view and direct interactions with holograms. Its developers say this technology has potential to do away with computing as we know it, creating an 'intuitive interface,' where holograms can be grabbed and moved like physical objects.

'Broken heart syndrome' - a condition thought to affect 6,000 people in Britain each year - occurs when extreme emotional stress causes the heart to shut down, but can also be the result of happy events.

Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth yesterday after a historic 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station. They landed in Kazakhstan at 11:26 p.m. EST. In an interview before heading home to Houston, Kelly said it was 'amazing' to feel the cold air when the hatch of his Soyuz capsule popped open after touchdown. 'I don't mean to say it's not fresh on the space station,' he said, 'but there's nothing like new cold air coming into the capsule.' He added that the burning smell of the capsule (pictured right) as it was coming down surprised him. 'The actual burning smell of the capsule is odd,' he said. 'It smells a little bit like a fragrance. I thought it was vegetation initially.'

Players of the simulator type in their postcode to become 'patient zero' and spread smallpox (stock image of patient pictured centre) through their neighbourhood. They then make choices about which hospital they would choose to use and the simulator charts the spread of infections and riots (top right) military defections (bottom right) and the collapse of civilisation within a month (screenshot left).

More than 500,000 documents were found when the Victorian archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt (bottom right) discovered the ancient city Oxyrhynchus, about 120 miles (193km) south of modern Cairo, in 1897 (bottom left). But until 2012, only 5,000 were ever translated. Now, volunteers are helping to decipher the texts (top), including a long-lost rendition of the Book of Exodus, written in the style of a Greek tragedy by an author called Ezekiel.

The crew of the yacht Maiken (inset) were sailing through the south Pacific near the Vava'u Islands in Tonga when they noticed that the water in the distance was a strange colour (top left). Then, as they approached, the sea mysteriously turned to stone (top right). The crew documented the phenomenon in a series of remarkable pictures as they sailed into formation (bottom left) to investigate it. What they didn't yet know was that, just a few miles away, a volcano was erupting under the surface (bottom right), spewing out new land that formed an island right before their eyes.

UFO hunters claim to have made a new discovery on the red planet, and they say it has significant religious implications. The alien enthusiasts have spotted what they say is a cross on a rocky Martian hill, and it stands just a stone's throw away from an alleged 'caved in roof' of a nearby structure. This bizarre claim was first spurred by a UFO hunter in France, who noticed the unusual shapes in a photo taken by Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover.

The first giant fin has now been attached to the 300ft-long ship, officially called the 'Airlander'. The two fins at the hanger in Cardington, Bedfordshire could cover the playing area of a tennis court.

Archaeologists have uncovered a large ancient wine press (pictured left) and Roman bathhouse (pipes shown top right) beneath the site of a famous orphanage in Jerusalem. The buildings and pottery (bottom right) found at the site are some 1,600-years-old and have been dated to the Roman or Byzantine period. Some bricks are stamped with the name of the Tenth Roman Legion suggesting soldiers were garrisoned there having played a role in the conquest of Jewish Jerusalem in 70AD.

Brooklyn-based artist Joana Ricou teamed up with biologists to photograph samples of bacteria found in people's belly buttons, four samples taken from people called 'Clive', 'Derwent', 'Esther' and 'Darren' are pictured top left to right. In total, the artist has created more than 400 portraits from the samples. She said she is inviting people to think about the other parts of their bodies, that aren't human, including the bacteria living inside their belly buttons.

Norwegian fighter pilot Morten 'Dolby' Hanche, pictured, has spent the past four months training on the F-35 stealth jet at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona having spent 2,200 hours on the F-16. Hanche claims the jet can perform a stunt seen during the 1986 movie Top Gun because of the aircraft's extreme manoeuvrability and its ability to 'stick like glue' to an opponent.

Scientists at Michigan State University found that yeast cells whose ability to break down fat molecules was suppressed, and so had more fat, tended to live longer than those who had lower levels of fat.

A new web app, designed by geographers at University College London, uses data from the Consumer Data Research Centre to return where the surname is most concentrated in the UK (pictured top), in comparison to the general population of the area. The heat maps show the highest likelihood in red, with the lowest in pale yellow. It claims that it can even predict where a couple likely met, based on both of their surnames (pictured bottom).

Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave in 2002, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt's southwest border with Libya and Sudan. The cave, which is also known as Wadi Sura II, includes 5,000 images that were painted or engraved into stone around 8,000 years earlier. Among the images are what was believed to be stencilled hands and feet of children. But now, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research claims the prints in the Egyptian cave have hands that are too small, and the fingers to long, to belong to a human.

Anthropologists at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, analysed the teeth of modern and fossils from early human species and found they can predict the size of other teeth from just a single sample.

Scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found male nursery web spiders that tie their partner up during sex (pictured) are less likely to become a post coital snack than those that skip bondage.

Boston Dynamics' 'Spot' robot, built in Waltham, Massachusetts, received a less than friendly welcome from a terrier named Alex belonging to Andy Rubin, the co-founder of Android. Alex can be seen barking at (pictured left and bottom right) and chasing (top right) Spot in a dog versus robot stand-off captured in a video by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson who shared the footage on YouTube.

The space agency has reborn its 'X-plane' project with a new supersonic jet design it hopes could one day replace passenger jets. The project is the first in a series of 'X-planes' in NASA's New Aviation Horizons initiative, introduced in the agency's Fiscal Year 2017 budget, Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden revealed. The Quiet Supersonic Technology (pictured) could takeoff in 2020 if funding is approved, and will have a supersonic 'heartbeat' rather than one large boom used by Concorde (inset), it is hoped.

The Moken children, who live a semi-nomadic lifestyle on the west coast of Thailand, have underwater vision that's twice as good as European children of the same age. Like dolphins, they appear to be able to spot small items, such as clams, beneath the waves without much difficulty. In 1999, Anna Gislen at the University of Lund, in Sweden decided to test whether the unique characteristics of the Moken tribe was genetic. According to an in-depth report in the BBC , she recently went back to the same tribe and found that the young children she studied, now in their late teens, still have the ability to see underwater.

The Macbook Selfie Stick functions just like a smartphone selfie stick - except that it can fit a full-size Macbook computer in its grips. It was created as an art project by Art404, John Yuyi, and Tom Galle.

Nasa's latest prediction shows asteroid 203 TX68 it will fly by 3m miles (5m km) from our planet on March 8th - and 'poses no threat to Earth'. Nasa's initial estimate showed the whale-sized space rock may skim past Earth at just 11,000 miles (17,000 km), which is around 21 times closer to Earth than the moon - but Nasa admitted this estimate may be widely inaccurate, and the asteroid may also pass Earth as far out as 9 million miles (14 million km).

EXCLUSIVE: Biologists at Roehampton University in London studied the gait of overweight king penguins returning to the land after feeding and those who lost weight after fasting while caring for chicks.

Mattel is give Barbie a high-tech makeover with a voice controlled home and her own hoverboad, The firm will also be launched a 3D printer that will allow kids to create and build their own unique toys.

A small probe could get to Mars in less time than it takes to watch 'Interstellar'. That's according to physicist, Phillip Lubin, who recently outlined how a probe could reach the red planet in just three days. Now, Lubin says that time could be reduced to just 30 minutes by using extremely powerful lasers to propel a wafer-thin probe. He claims that by firing a laser at a spacecraft, it would have the ability to achieve frictionless acceleration in space. That would allow it to reach a more than a quarter speed of light in just minutes. This means that the craft would be travelling at roughly 174.3 million miles per hour.

Researchers from Stanford University in California have found that people living in areas with the brightest lights at night are more likely to sleep less than six hours per night and waking up in the night.

The ghastly creature is captured slithering its way between rocks and up the side of the tank in the clip, filmed in the U.S, after the man spotted it while he was cleaning the aquarium's filthy glass.

Researchers say we tend to choose partners that look similar to our parents. It isn't just faces either, people will choose mates with the same height, hair and eye colour and even amount of body hair.

The Illustris project, led by the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, simulated a cube of space within the universe, 350 million light years long on each side.

Experts reveal what's it takes to build a time machine. All you need is a 100km long cylinder that you can rotate so fast it disrupts the fabric of time and space -- that is if you can survive the pressure.